


A Hundred Thousand Miles

by Sholio



Series: The Epic Post-Series Road Trip of DOOM [24]
Category: Iron Fist (TV)
Genre: F/M, Families of Choice, Family, Gen, New Year's Eve, New Years
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-31
Updated: 2019-12-31
Packaged: 2021-02-27 12:33:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22057090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/pseuds/Sholio
Summary: Colleen deals with being far away from Danny on New Year’s. But maybe it’s not that far after all, and she’s not as alone as she thought.
Relationships: Danny Rand/Colleen Wing
Series: The Epic Post-Series Road Trip of DOOM [24]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1232444
Comments: 14
Kudos: 31





	A Hundred Thousand Miles

**Author's Note:**

> This is my 2019 New Year's story, something I've done for the past few years. Previous years' stories:
> 
> • [2016 (Agent Carter ficlet)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5742253/chapters/22229390)  
> • [2017 (Agent Carter ficlet)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5742253/chapters/30256950)  
> • [2018 ("Ball Drop in Times Square", Iron Fist)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17253290)
> 
> Happy New Year!
> 
> This follows on directly from [Silver in the City](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21943345) (this year's Christmas story) and references some of its events.

Last year, Colleen and Danny had spent New Year's together. They'd curled up on the couch and watched the ball drop on TV, cozy under a fluffy afghan that looked handmade but had actually been picked up at a thrift-store sale. The refurbished dojo was finally starting to look like a home, and it was full of things like that: the old, the rescued, the restored. She and Danny had agreed that the best kinds of things for their home were the kind of things that were either bought from their makers, or bought secondhand and refurbished. (Okay, she'd relented a bit on Christmas decorations, because it was Danny's first Christmas after K'un Lun and he'd wanted to make the place glitter.)

But New Year's had been just for them. Claire had texted a cheerful greeting, and Danny had called Ward for a few minutes early in the evening -- an awkward conversation, brief and stilted, but sincere: two people trying to find their way back to family, neither sure exactly where they stood. 

But other than that, it was just the two of them. They'd ordered takeout and made cookies, and watched old movies on TV and kissed each other at midnight. It was everything Colleen imagined a New Year's should be.

This year, she'd had New Year Observed with Danny via FaceTime at 11 a.m., counting down to his local midnight along with him while, in the background, she caught flashes of red wall hangings in a hotel room or hostel in ... she wasn't even sure _where_ they were now, to be honest. It was a short conversation; Danny was tranked up on cold meds (apparently he had the flu) and Ward kept trying to make him go to bed. So Colleen and Ward had a brief, slightly uncomfortable conversation -- they were more relaxed around each other these days, but it was still somewhat fraught without Danny as a buffer -- and said happy new year and hung up.

She didn't really have to go in to the center today, but she did it anyway because it was something to do. There was almost no one there. People kept asking if she planned to watch the Times Square ball drop, and she got no less than four different invitations to various New Year's Eve parties. She turned them all down.

... and regretted it, then, when she found herself back in the empty dojo, drifting around aimlessly, making cups of tea that she forgot to drink and starting to watch specials on TV that she didn't feel like finishing. The early winter dusk had settled on the city hours ago, and the darkness outside the windows gave her a closed-in feeling, almost like being trapped.

She could go out and patrol the city. That was what she did when she felt this restless -- _like Danny used to,_ she thought. Back then, she'd always stayed home. And eventually he'd gone halfway around the world, and she ...

\-- _liked_ it here, she _did;_ she'd had plenty of opportunities by now to join them if she wanted to, and she really _didn't_ want to. Here was where she had built a life around her, full of friends who had been sending her well-wishes all day. And things were _good_ between her and Danny, surprisingly so, even with thousands of miles separating them.

She thought about calling him. It would be morning there -- kind of early-ish, but Danny was an early riser. Except he was sick, and probably ought to sleep. He'd text her when he woke up, if she knew him.

She ought to go to one of those parties after all. Hang around with a bunch of drunk people she barely knew ... yeah, that sounded fun.

On a whim, she texted Misty: _Busy tonight?_

The answer came back immediately: _Working. Sorry._

_Man, you get all the crap shifts._

_Tell me about it. Happy New Year._

_You too,_ Colleen texted back. She tossed the phone on the table, made herself a giant bowl of popcorn, and put on _American Ninja Warrior._

Festive.

* * *

She woke, with a jolt. Streaming playback had timed out on the TV. The popcorn bowl had fallen to the floor. Colleen sat up, yawned, and looked at her phone. Just before 10 p.m. No texts from Danny.

Great. She flopped back on the couch, bleary with sleep. Staying asleep would've been fine. Going back to sleep didn't seem to be a thing. And now she was going to be up all night, with nothing but her thoughts for company.

She peeled herself off the couch and made a cup of tea that she didn't really want.

Not too late to crash one of those parties. Or go out on patrol for awhile. Maybe pester Misty down at the precinct for a little while.

She just didn't _want_ to. She didn't want to be around strangers and she didn't want to be around people who knew her well -- didn't want to be around _people,_ really, except she didn't want to be alone either. What she wanted was Danny, and she couldn't have that.

She hesitated, and then scrolled through her contacts. There was one that was only in there because of the volunteer thing last week. They didn't even _like_ each other. And yet.

After seeing Joy at the community center on Christmas, she had a feeling that she might not be the only person staying in on New Year's.

She brought up Joy's number and typed: _Hey. It's Colleen. Happy New Year if you're up._ Hesitated for a few long minutes -- and sent.

There. Family business done. Or ... whatever she and Joy were to each other. 

She didn't expect an answer. She certainly didn't expect one to come back right away. _Staying up for the ball drop?_

Colleen had to laugh. It was such an ordinary question; it was the question she'd been asked fifty times already today. It was such a _normal_ thing.

 _Probably,_ she texted back. _You?_

 _Guess so._ And just as Colleen started to put the phone down, assuming that was it, the phone buzzed with another text. _Come over if you want._

That was ... unexpected. She shook her head, turned off the screen, put the phone down. And then she picked it up again.

_Are you having a party?_

_If one person is a party,_ Joy texted back. _There's booze._

Well, that explained ... some of it: Joy was drunk. Colleen grimaced and put down the phone, and then it vibrated _again_ with directions.

She didn't want to go over to Joy's. She didn't want to accept this friendly overture, or whatever it was, from someone she'd never liked, someone who had hurt Danny in ways she could never forgive. And she particularly didn't want to deal with whatever a drunken Joy would entail -- apologies, recriminations, drunken confessions: all were equally unwelcome.

So she wasn't sure what she was about, as she grabbed her coat and brought up the Lyft app. 

Maybe the unknown beat sitting around here for the next two hours, getting drunk on the Christmas-gift bottle of wine from Misty and knowing she wouldn't be sleepy for hours, no matter how much she wanted to be.

* * *

It was after 11 by the time she got to Joy's place. She had remembered about halfway there that she didn't actually _need_ directions; it looked like Joy was still in the same warehouse-refurbished-to-fancy-condos where she'd lived when Colleen and Misty had gone to pick her up, months ago.

It felt like another lifetime.

Colleen hesitated at the door, but at this point her only option was heading back across town, and getting any sort of transportation around midnight on New Year's wasn't worth the hassle. She knocked.

There was a pause, and the sound of some clinking inside, before Joy opened the door. 

She didn't _look_ drunk. Naturally her lounging-around clothes were fancier than Colleen's entire wardrobe; she wore a silk robe over what might either be a pantsuit or a pair of incredibly expensive pajamas. Aside from that, though, she had her hair twisted back in a simple tie and wore no makeup. She looked exposed like that, stripped of her armor and strangely young-looking. It was often easy to forget that Joy and Danny were the same age.

They just looked at each other for a minute, and then: "Come in," Joy said, and stepped back. "Drink?"

"Yes, please."

The apartment was about like Colleen remembered. Sterile, bright, new -- a catalog furniture display come to life. Since she'd last been here, though, it had gained a slight patina of wear: a rumpled dress thrown carelessly over the back of a chair, books on tabletops, keys and a handful of jewelry dropped on a countertop. Little human things. A laptop was open on the coffee table next to a glass of wine and an incongruous plate of colorfully iced Christmas cookies. Aside from that, there were no holiday decorations anywhere. Then again, Colleen hadn't done anything with the dojo this year either, so it wasn't like she could throw stones.

She toed off her shoes at the door by habit, remembered only after she'd done it that most Americans didn't. At this point in her life Colleen considered herself about as naturalized as it was possible to get, but taking off shoes in the house was a holdover habit from childhood she'd never lost, and one that she and Danny had continued to observe. She just wasn't used to being inside other people's houses. It didn't come up all that much. And she was a lot more likely to go on autopilot with household courtesy when she was tense.

She had the ridiculous thought of putting them back on, then curled her toes in Joy's plush carpet instead. Joy was barefoot anyway. They weren't standing on ceremony. Colleen followed her into the kitchen, where Joy was pouring red wine into a glass. There was another glass in the sink, with wine residue in the bottom and lipstick on the rim.

"You had a guest?" Colleen asked. "-- Sorry, forget I asked that. Not my business. I hope I didn't interrupt anything."

"You didn't." Joy poured the glass much higher than Colleen would have chosen for herself and handed it to her. She did not elaborate. Instead she went over to the couch and Colleen, after a moment, followed her.

They sat on opposite ends of an off-white couch that was actually more comfortable than it looked, though Colleen held the glass very carefully to avoid spilling and wished she'd worn something nicer than a sweatshirt and paint-stained jeans. Then she decided that if there was a damn dress code for hanging out at Joy's house, she wouldn't have come in the first place.

Joy was the one who broke the silence, reaching for her own wine glass with a soft laugh. "I didn't expect you'd come."

"That makes two of us."

"Hmm." Joy sipped her wine. "Why did you?"

"Why did you invite me?"

"Fair enough," Joy said. "Have a cookie, by the way. They're not bad. They're from the condo association." As Colleen picked one up, she added, "That was a week ago, so it might be stale. Sorry, I forgot. I'm not really that much of a sweets person."

No ... she probably wasn't. There was no graceful way to put down the cookie, so Colleen took a hesitant bite. It crunched in a way that she didn't think iced shortbread cookies were supposed to, and also didn't harmonize with red wine very well.

"It's stale, isn't it?" Joy said. "Here."

She leaned forward and took it, then was left with a handful of stale and broken cookie, while Colleen had a mouthful of cookie that she really had no choice but to swallow. And then Joy laughed a little, and Colleen covered her mouth and fought back a smile. Joy looked around for a place to put the cookie and put it on the edge of the plate. After a minute, she got up and took the plate to the kitchen and dumped it in the trash. She came back with the wine bottle and topped off their glasses.

That almost felt like an icebreaker, except it didn't lead to anything. Colleen washed the taste of stale icing out of her mouth with wine. Joy seemed to be looking anywhere but at her.

This was the worst New Year's Eve party ever, Colleen thought. If she had to sit here for the next half hour drinking Joy's wine in awkward silence, she was going to back-flip out the window and go out on patrol anyway. So she broke the silence herself, casting around for some topic of conversation. "What did you used to do on New Year's? Back when you were kids. With Danny."

"What does anyone do?" Joy raised a shoulder in a fluid shrug.

"I don't know," Colleen said, annoyance clipping her words. "It was Lunar New Year for me when I was a kid, mostly."

"Oh." Joy hesitated, seeming suddenly unsure, a little off balance. "I don't think I'd realized -- I assumed you grew up here."

"I came to the US when I was twelve."

"Hmm. Well." Joy smiled, looking not at Colleen, but at the blank white wall, as if her memories threw shadow-pictures there. "Our parents threw a party every year at the townhouse. Department heads, major investors, personal friends. Lots of adults getting drunk and talking about work. We were usually the only kids there, so we entertained ourselves like kids do at grownup parties. Running around annoying the adults, crawling under tables. Ward was usually supposed to keep an eye on us." Her smile grew a little softer, a little more fond; Colleen wondered if she knew. "We made my brother's life hell. But that's what little sisters do."

 _I wouldn't know._ But she didn't say that. It was an old twinge, the dry ache of a long-healed wound. She had craved brothers and sisters, a family, a sense of belonging. And then Bakuto's dojo, her fellow students -- _No. Too soon, too soon._

"Danny never talked about this?" Joy asked suddenly, coming back from the place she'd gone in her head, walls springing up and shutters snapping closed behind her eyes.

"I don't think New Year's came up specifically." They might have talked about it a little last year, but it ran together, in her head, with all Danny's stories from his childhood, a mix of wistful reminiscences and a sort of oblivious lack of awareness of how strange, isolated and -- yes -- privileged his childhood had been. He simply didn't have anything to compare it to.

"What about you?" Joy asked. The wine glass brushed her lips. It was nearly empty. She seemed to notice, and reached for the bottle to refill it. "What _did_ you do at Lunar New Year?"

"What anyone does," Colleen said, and Joy acknowledged the parry with a wry twist of her lips. But ... Colleen wasn't ready to hand her stories over yet. Not to Joy. She had seen what the Meachums did with other people's secrets.

Joy topped off her glass, offered the nearly empty bottle. Colleen started to shake her head, then held her glass out and Joy tipped up the bottle and delivered the last half-ounce to Colleen's nearly untouched wine.

"So anyway," Joy said, "after Danny's parents ... _After,_ the parties stopped. At least, they weren't held at the house anymore. The original New Year's Eve party turned into a big corporate gala at Rand. Less personal, and a lot more like the company Christmas parties, where people put in an appearance and took a door prize ticket and ate iced shrimp on Rand's dime. And then Dad died, and the galas became our problem, mine and Ward's. I mean ..." She stopped, an odd look on her face. "I guess Dad _was_ still planning them, except I didn't know. It always went through Ward. He was always very specific about the guest list; I used to wonder ..." She shook her head. "Anyway, the holidays were for business for my entire life. We weren't a Christmas family."

"I'm shocked," Colleen said, and surprised herself with a little smile; was surprised even more when Joy answered it with one of her own, quick but sincere. "Christmas wasn't really a holiday for me, growing up."

"Not even after you came here?"

"It was ..." Different. She couldn't explain Bakuto's dojo. Not to Joy. She had enough trouble talking to Danny about it. "... still a lot like being back home."

"I'm going to guess you and Danny had a Christmas last year, at least. It was always his kind of thing." Joy sounded ... not jealous, exactly. But there was a fraught undercurrent. 

Colleen didn't want to talk about Danny with Joy. But leaving out Danny, the number of things they had in common dropped to approximately zero. "Yeah," she said. "He's really into it."

"Deck the halls? Put up a tree?"

"Oh, yes." She'd had to talk Danny out of buying every Christmas item in Macy's, including the six-foot-tall LED-filled snowman that sprayed colored light across the walls like a disco ball. A few animatronic reindeer _had_ come home with them.

The tree had been relatively understated, though it did have a bent top and Colleen suspected he'd picked it because he felt a little bit sorry for it.

This year, all the decorations Danny had bought last year had stayed in boxes. She hadn't felt the lack of Christmas. What she had felt was the lack of Danny. With him here, it would probably have been fun to drag all that stupid glittery stuff out and throw sparkly things everywhere. Without him, she wasn't particularly interested in doing it for herself. It was his holiday and she liked celebrating it with him, but because of him more than the holiday.

She realized Joy had asked something about stockings, hung by the chimney. It sounded mocking.

"We decorated," she said, and turned it around. "What did you do last year?"

Joy flinched at that. "It wasn't much of a holiday," she said. "But then again, neither were most of ours. Danny's family were the ones with the cheerful, old-fashioned country Christmas and the pile of presents under the tree. We had tastefully coordinated ornaments that we weren't allowed to touch."

"I thought your family didn't do Christmas?"

"Oh, we did it," Joy said. "In the most magazine-spread kind of way possible."

"... okay," Colleen said, and then her phone vibrated in her pocket.

 _Saved by the bell,_ she thought, until she saw who it was. Though, who _else_ was it going to be, at almost midnight on New Year's? When she came over here, she somehow hadn't put it together with the extreme likelihood that Danny was probably going to call her to share her New Year's the way she'd shared his.

Danny. Who was where Ward was.

And she was with Joy.

Yeah, this wasn't awkward at all.

"Sorry, I ... um." She put it on voice only.

"Colleen! Hi!" There was still a little raspiness in Danny's voice, but he sounded a lot better. "Can we switch to the face chat? You don't have to worry if you're in bed or something. I won't let Ward see the screen." At this, Ward said something in the background in a mildly annoyed tone, and Colleen felt her face heat as if she actually _was_ doing something wrong. Ward _was_ there. Dammit.

"No, I ..." She looked up at Joy, who looked poker-faced, almost frozen. And then she decided she was _not_ going to do it like this; she refused to have a stilted, cursory conversation with her half-a-world-away boyfriend just to avoid some potential awkwardness that was the Meachums' fault in the first place. She could still keep the phone turned away from Joy ... "Yeah, hang on."

She got the phone switched over to video chat. "Colleen!" Danny exclaimed, delighted, waving vigorously with his free hand. He was outside somewhere, cheeks flushed red with the cold wind, winter sunshine glittering behind him.

"Should you really be outside?" Colleen asked. "Ward said you had pneumonia."

"Ward is a lying liar who lies," Danny declared cheerfully. He didn't _look_ terrible; much better than earlier, in fact, though she had to remind herself that it had been the middle of his night when she'd last talked to him, and now it was early afternoon and he was well rested. "Anyway, it's just a patio." He rotated the phone so she could see it: outdoor furniture and snow on a balcony railing and Ward looking cold and annoyed. "There's Ward! Say hi to Colleen, Ward."

"Hi, Colleen," Ward said dutifully, squinting at her. "Can we go _in_ \--" He broke off, his face changing. "Is that my sister's apartment?"

Colleen froze. It hadn't occurred to her that Ward might recognize it.

She looked up, over the phone, at Joy, who had drawn her feet up under herself and looked like she was ... curling up, curling in, like she wanted to make a ball of herself and extend spines like a proximity mine.

"It _is,"_ Ward said, sounding incredulous and annoyed, his default setting aside from sarcastic and annoyed. "Why are you at Joy's?"

"I don't have to -- you know what? Here. You can talk to each other."

 _"What?"_ Ward said, but there was _no fucking way_ Colleen was going to play middleman for the world's most awkward sibling reunion. She held out the phone toward a shell-shocked Joy instead.

At least Joy recovered quickly, sitting up straighter. "Ward."

"Joy." At this point Colleen couldn't see his expression, but the rush of feeling in his voice was a startling change from the Ward she knew. "Hi," he said, in a slightly more Ward-normal tone. "I, ah. I got your text."

"And I got yours," Joy said. "And Danny's. I understand you almost died in Mongolia."

"We did not 'almost die in Mongolia.'" Ward was the only person Colleen had met who could do audible air quotes. "Mistakes were made, that's all."

"I appreciate your use of the passive voice there. Good plausible deniability."

"Okay then," Ward said. "Mistakes were made ... by Danny."

Colleen bristled defensively, but Danny just said, "Hey!" in the background, and then, "Is that Joy? How is she? Does she look happy?"

There was a quick ripple of expression across Joy's features, the corners of her mouth pressing in, her eyes sparkling with a flash of amusement before she straightened her face out. She leaned back on the couch and held Colleen's phone out at arm's length. "You look good, Ward," she said, and half-smiled. "And cold."

"Yeah, it's freezing out here. Joy ..." He hesitated; Colleen was still only getting the auditory part of the conversation, but she could see Joy's reactions, the slight narrowing of her eyes like another emotion wanted to slip through. "You look good too," Ward said. "I think Danny wants to talk to you."

"I -- no, Ward --"

She was trying to shove the phone at Colleen, who heartlessly shoved it back at her, and they were in the middle of a tussle when Danny said, "Hi, Joy."

Joy caught the phone, and brushed back her hair with one hand, a quick nervous reflex. "Danny," she said. "Would you like to talk to Colleen again?"

"Yeah, I just wanted to say happy New Year, Joy."

"Happy New Year to you, and here's Colleen," Joy said, sounding out of breath as if she'd been running. She shoved the phone at Colleen, who took it and turned it around. 

"Hey," Danny said, smiling at her. He didn't look at all like he'd just been talking to someone who had literally tried to murder him.

"Hey," she said back, while Joy jumped up and grabbed their wine glasses (hers empty, Colleen's still mostly full) and vanished into the kitchen.

How could he _do_ it? she wondered. How could Danny _be_ the way he was? Both these people had tried to kill him. They'd locked him up and sold him out and stolen the Iron Fist from him. And now he was there with Ward, he was beaming holiday greetings at Joy, like it didn't even _matter._

And that was what it really came down to. It did matter to her. She wasn't going to forgive them ... not like _that,_ not just because they smiled at him and claimed to want a relationship with him.

She needed more than a smile and a glib promise of friendship.

And yet, here she was.

"Hey, hey!" Danny was saying on the phone. "It's almost midnight where you are. We have to count down."

"I don't know if we need to count down," Colleen said, half-laughing. "We just did it earlier today." It was one thing counting down in the privacy of their own home. But doing it in front of the Meachums ...

"Sure, I'll count," Joy said from the kitchen.

Colleen looked up, surprised, looking for traces of mocking. Joy was refilling the wine glasses, not looking at her.

"Yeah, okay, what the hell." Ward was just out of camera range, but not voice range. "C'mon, let's do this."

"Wait, wait, hold on." Danny was doing something with his phone. "You should watch the ball drop, Colleen!"

"I'm not going to --"

"Oh, here," Joy said. She'd come back from the kitchen, and she picked up a remote and aimed it at a flat-screen TV on the wall that Colleen hadn't even noticed. The screen lit up with a burst of noise and glitter and announcer voices, and yeah, they were counting down to midnight now.

"What's it down to? Colleen?" Danny urged. "I can't get the seconds to count down on this phone and Ward doesn't have his out here."

Apparently they _were_ doing this. Joy turned up the volume on the TV, and Colleen joined in "Nine."

"Eight," Joy said, staring at the TV and not looking at Colleen.

They managed to get in sync by three, and hit one together, and then the screen went wild with cheering and Danny laughed, bright-eyed and red-nosed with the cold. "Happy New Year, Colleen! Joy!"

"Happy New Year to you." Colleen smiled at him; she couldn't help it. "Ward, make him go inside."

"On it," Ward said, and before Colleen realized he was going to, he reached across Danny and ended the call. She was looking at a blank screen.

She looked up, after a moment, at Joy. The TV still blared in the background. Joy absently turned it off; the silence rang with absence.

"They hung up?" Joy said after a moment.

"Guess so." Colleen gave the phone another look before slowly putting it away.

"Do you ..." Joy still had the two wine glasses in one hand, stems twined precariously between her fingers, with the remote in the other. She gestured.

Colleen gave an instant's thought to spending the _rest_ of the evening, what was left of it, suffering through awkward stop-and-go conversations, and hopped off the couch. "No, I'd better get going. Beat the rush."

"You won't," Joy said. "Every ride for hire in the city is going to be converging on Times Square. Wait a minute."

She put the wine glasses on the coffee table and took a quick glance across the sparse countertop clutter before picking up a small round fob that she tossed to Colleen.

"Keyless start. Parking garage is under the building. Just take the battery out of the fob and leave it inside the car under the floor mat. I'll Uber over tomorrow and get it."

"I ... uh ... you don't mind?" 

"I hardly ever drive it," Joy said.

 _Please stop trying to be friends with me!_ a tiny part of Colleen's brain wailed desperately, but the alternative was probably sitting downstairs for hours while some ride-sharing driver eventually peeled away from the post-New-Year rush and got around to her. She nodded, clutched the key fob, and fled.

She last glimpsed Joy pouring out Colleen's undrunken wine and setting the glass in the sink, then reaching for her own full one.

* * *

Colleen had subconsciously expected Joy's car to be absurdly sleek and expensive. It was sleek, but it was also tiny and electric. Colleen went through a brief fumble with the controls -- she didn't drive much, and had never driven an electric car before -- before figuring it out adequately enough to drive it without being a danger to herself and others.

The car smelled like Joy, or at least the way that Colleen, in her limited experience with Joy, felt that Joy _should_ smell: a sweet, almost cloying perfume, with undertones of leather and paper and new-car-smell. It was a money kind of smell. Like the apartment, the interior of the car was almost inhumanly clean, with only the tiniest handful of personal touches -- an old coffee lid on the passenger-side floor, a lipstick and packet of tissues tucked into the door pocket.

 _I should probably have thanked her, shouldn't I?_ The thought came to her belatedly as she drove through the strangely deserted nighttime streets. And then she was angry for feeling guilty about it. She didn't _want_ to be tangled up with the Meachums. She didn't like being drawn back into their orbit every time she thought she'd gotten out of it.

But she was feeling more relaxed by the time she reached the dojo. She found a parking space just about a block down, and left the fob as Joy had instructed her, locking the doors on her way out. She very nearly left it at that, because there was something entertaining about the idea of Joy endlessly circling the block as she tried to find her car, but ... _Okay, fine,_ Colleen thought at her conscience, and banged out a quick text to Joy with the car's location as she walked home.

The odd sense of relaxation, of lingering warmth, that had come over her on the way home stayed with her into the dojo, where the emptiness and silence felt a little friendlier than earlier, the isolation of calm and not loneliness. Colleen contemplated the teapot, then broke open a bottle of wine and poured herself a glass.

There was a text from Danny on her phone. It had come in while she was driving. _Thanks for giving Ward a chance to talk to Joy. Are you and Joy friends now??_

 _Oh hell no,_ she thought, but just then another text landed, this time from Joy.

 _Thanks,_ it said. _I'm glad you came over tonight._

Colleen moaned quietly and had some wine and then, hoping Joy had gone to bed by now and wouldn't get it until morning, texted back, _Me too._


End file.
